Pirates closer, area native Bednar booed at home
PITTSBURGH — David Bednar‘s first three seasons in Pittsburgh largely have been charmed ones as the hometown kid developed into a two-time All-Star closer for a team convinced it’s on the rise.
And while the Pirates might be on their way to contention, Bednar is faltering. The right-hander blew his third save in four chances on Tuesday when Detroit rallied for a 5-3 win.
The most jarring moment wasn’t the walk or the two batters he hit that fueled the Tigers’ comeback, but the sound of Bednar being booed at home by a crowd that has emphatically embraced him from the moment he arrived from San Diego in the January 2021 trade that sent Joe Musgrove to the Padres.
While Bednar, who spent most of spring training sidelined with a lat injury, took responsibility for his performance, his teammates are more concerned about the way he was treated by fans when he left the game.
“This is the pride of Pittsburgh,” first baseman Rowdy Tellez said. “To everybody: We don’t do that out here. … What happened today is, I think, unacceptable. We as a group in Pittsburgh have got to be better. He’s an All-Star for a reason and we just have to be better.”
Bednar, 29, called Tellez’s support “huge” but added he’s in a tough spot at the moment.
Bednar grew up in the suburb of Mars, about 30 minutes from PNC Park, and has been a fixture at the back end of the bullpen for the past two seasons. He’s piled up 58 saves in that span behind a dazzling fastball and a combative attitude on the mound.
The lifelong fan of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers typically takes the mound to the rock song “Renegade” by Styx, which serves as a call to arms for the Steelers’ defense during home games at nearby Acrisure Stadium.
While the Pirates are off to a 9-3 start, one of their best over the past 30 years, Bednar has struggled. He couldn’t lock down the save against Miami on March 31 or Baltimore on Saturday. Ultimately it didn’t cost his team as Pittsburgh managed to win both games.
Not Tuesday. He walked onto the mound with the Pirates up 3-1. He left it with Pittsburgh trailing after he retired just one of six batters. He walked Riley Greene starting the ninth, hit Spencer Torkelson then gave up a single to Gio Urshela that ultimately scored two and tied the score. Kerry Carpenter followed one out later with a single and Bednar then nicked Javy Báez.
Command typically hasn’t been a problem for Bednar, who had hit just five batters in 193 appearances before Tuesday.
“Just no control in the zone right now,” Bednar said. “That’s my bread and butter. That’s what makes me good. Just need to get back to throwing strikes in the zone, competing in the zone. When I do that, good things happen.”
Pittsburgh manager Derek Shelton said he thinks Bednar is healthy and the issue is centered on rust that built up while Bednar recovered from the lat injury.
“It’s a matter of being sharp,” Shelton said. “But, I think this is also a matter of when you see pitchers miss spring training that this can have some effect.”
The Pirates are off Wednesday before beginning a seven-game trip in Philadelphia on Thursday. They do have options, including temporarily moving seven-time All-Star reliever Aroldis Chapman from the setup role to a closer.
“Yeah, I think we’ll sit down and talk about why we think there’s command issues,” Shelton said. “If it’s mechanical, if it’s pitch mix, what it is. I think once we figure that out, we kind of go from there.”
Bednar for now is trying to take solace that this bump is happening in April and not September for a team that believes it can contend in the up-for-grabs NL Central.
“I think everybody’s gone through these before,” Bednar said. “I’ve had some struggles before and overcome them. It’s still so early. Obviously, very frustrating, but at the end of the year hopefully we’ll be looking back and laughing at this.”
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Tim Keown
TOKYO — Shohei Ohtani seems impervious to a variety of conditions that afflict most humans — nerves, anxiety, distraction — but it took playing a regular-season big-league game in his home country to change all of that.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Opening Day 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs in the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani made a surprising admission. “It’s been a while since I felt this nervous playing a game,” he said. “It took me four or five innings.”
Ohtani had two hits and scored twice, and one of his outs was a hard liner that left his bat at more than 96 mph, so the nerves weren’t obvious from the outside. But clearly the moment, and its weeklong buildup, altered his usually stoic demeanor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shohei nervous,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But one thing I did notice was how emotional he got during the Japanese national anthem. I thought that was telling.”
As the Dodgers began the defense of last year’s World Series win, it became a night to showcase the five Japanese players on the two teams. For the first time in league history, two Japanese pitchers — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — faced each other on Opening Day. Both pitched well, with Imanaga throwing four hitless innings before being removed after 69 pitches.
“Seventy was kind of the number we had for Shota,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It was the right time to take him out.”
The Dodgers agreed, scoring three in the fifth inning off reliever Ben Brown. Imanaga kept the Dodgers off balance, but his career-high four walks created two stressful innings that ran up his pitch count.
Yamamoto rode the adrenaline of pitching in his home country, routinely hitting 98 with his fastball and vexing the Cubs with a diving splitter over the course of five three-hit innings. He threw with a kind of abandon, finding a freedom that often eluded him last year in his first year in America.
“I think last year to this year, the confidence and conviction he has throwing the fastball in the strike zone is night and day,” Roberts said. “If he can continue to do that, I see no reason he won’t be in the Cy Young conversation this season.”
Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki went hitless in four at bats — the Cubs had only three hits, none in the final four innings against four relievers out of the Dodgers’ loaded bullpen — and rookie Roki Sasaki will make his first start of his Dodger career in the second and final game of the series Wednesday.
“I don’t think there was a Japanese baseball player in this country who wasn’t watching tonight,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers were without Mookie Betts, who left Japan on Monday after it was decided his illness would not allow him to play in this series. And less than an hour before game time, first baseman Freddie Freeman was scratched with what the team termed “left rib discomfort,” a recurrence of an injury he first sustained during last year’s playoffs.
The night started with a pregame celebration that felt like an Olympic opening ceremony in a lesser key. There were Pikachus on the field and a vaguely threatening video depicting the Dodgers and Cubs as Monster vs. Monster. World home-run king Saduharu Oh was on the field before the game, and Roberts called meeting Oh “a dream come true.”
For the most part, the crowd was subdued, as if it couldn’t decide who or what to root for, other than Ohtani. It was admittedly confounding: throughout the first five innings, if fans rooted for the Dodgers they were rooting against Imanaga, but rooting for the Cubs meant rooting against Yamamoto. Ohtani, whose every movement is treated with a rare sense of wonder, presented no such conflict.
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